Chapter 18
Paul walks briskly to the newsstand the next morning, his heart pounding in his chest. The Harper’s issue is there, front and center.
He stops walking, stops breathing. His eyes land first on Judith’s face: wry, reserved, unknowable.
I exist, it says. I’m here. And even though Paul knows better, it’s suddenly as if she were here, staring him down, challenging his bogus story of her “last wish.” This isn’t what I wanted, she’s saying with that closed expression of hers, and Paul checks over his shoulder to see if anyone else has witnessed his exposure as a sham.
But there are only strangers passing by, utterly indifferent, and Amir gives his usual kind smile when Paul pays, asking him why he’s buying several copies.
When Paul points a finger at his own name, under Judith’s on the cover, Amir claps his hands with real glee.
He rummages behind him then and pulls out a cigar—a good one, Paul notes—and Paul takes it gladly, gratefully, his mood shifting like the ground beneath him.
He’s happy again, proud of what he’s done. Who he’s become. A true success.
Amir lights the cigar for him, leaving Paul to stand on the sidewalk, puffing, staring at the cover, which reads: JUDITH STANLEY, Suburban Housewife, Murder Victim, Visionary Photographer: A Portfolio.
Edited and Introduced by Paul Sorenson. He loves seeing his own name but hates the descriptors they’ve used for Judith.
He tried to get them to change them—or their order, at least—but the editors (not Marty, who agreed with him) won out.
They said it would sell, and Paul concedes the point; those descriptors alone could compel people who aren’t usually interested in art to buy the issue in droves.
And Paul wants it to sell. If it doesn’t, then what will he have to show for his hard work, for the risks he’s taken?
Paul buys a croissant and coffee, then heads to the tiny park not far from his apartment.
He sits on a bench, takes a deep breath, and flips through to the portfolio.
It’s right in the middle: a centerfold. He smiles at the sight of his byline but doesn’t read the introduction yet; he skips ahead to Judith’s pictures.
It’s like seeing them for the first time, in all their vibrant, playful, breathtaking beauty.
He stares at each one, knowing that he himself selected these, put them in order, had them published—and here they are.
He feels as though he’s floating in air, observing himself from above.
He seems to watch himself flip back through the pages to his introduction.
And then his own words bring him back to earth; he shuts out everything but the lines before him, the lines he’s written:
To the everyday observer, Judith Stanley would have seemed like an average woman: a housewife, a mother, and the unassuming resident of a suburban New Jersey town.
Like so many women of her age and middle-class status, she had a hobby, too: taking photographs.
When she enrolled in my Introduction to Photography class at New Jersey Community College, I, too, was fooled by her appearance.
I saw her as a quiet, self-contained woman, probably trying to fill her empty evenings now that her children were gone.
I didn’t give her much thought at all; though older than my average student, she blended in, became just another face among many in the lecture hall.
When she handed me her photographs one night after class, everything changed.
It was like I’d been sleepwalking, and Judith’s pictures smacked me awake.
That’s how good, how original, how startling they were.
Especially the self-portraits. I’d never seen anything like them, and I was well-versed in the current trends of portrait and self-portrait photography.
Judith was doing something thrillingly new, yet she had no idea.
She may have known that she was “good” at photography, that she had a knack for seeking out idiosyncratic subjects and views, but she didn’t know how uncommonly gifted she was—and neither did anyone around her.
I’m honored, and so grateful, to have been the one to first recognize Judith Stanley for the major talent she is—or rather, sadly, was.
I didn’t know, when we met, that Judith was being stalked.
Sometimes by telephone: it would ring and no one would answer, or the caller would say terrible, intimate things to her over the line.
He followed her, too, as she traveled around taking photographs, keeping his distance but always there, and appearing, she said, as a shadow in the background of many self-portraits—though she religiously cropped him out, and you’ll see no sign of him in this selection.
He approached her a handful of times and then finally, tragically, he stabbed her after class one late fall evening.
He left her for dead in the parking lot, then vanished into the night.
I’m haunted knowing that if I’d left the building sooner and spotted her lying in a pool of her own blood, I might have saved her. Her killer has yet to be found.
It was—and is—a terrible loss. To her family and friends, of course, but also to the rest of us, as you’ll soon discover yourself.
I never knew Judith the mother, Judith the wife, or even Judith the friend, but I did know Judith the photographer.
And she was mighty. She is mighty. She was struck down far too soon, but her work will endure.
Over the past weeks, I’ve worked diligently to select twenty of her most striking photographs for the portfolio that follows—a true feat, given that nearly every photograph in her substantial oeuvre is striking.
Judith had been wary of sharing her photographs publicly; she was a private person.
But on her last day in class, which was also, sadly, the last day of her life, she asked me to help her publish her work.
I was eager to do so. She was eager, too; I only wish she could have lived to see this exquisite portfolio come to fruition.
Welcome to the world of Judith Stanley: small-town parades, suburban parties, self-portraits, lovers’ spats, outcasts, and city sights as you’ve never before seen them.
Enjoy these glimpses of our mundane lives made wholly new through the lens of Judith’s incredibly uncanny eye.
Paul Sorenson, Photographer and Photography Instructor
Paul looks up and around, almost expecting the oblivious passersby to tell him, Well done.
He thinks his introduction is really quite good, and aside from that, no one who reads it will miss the glaring proof of his interwovenness with Judith Stanley.
Tom Senior won’t like it; he won’t like how Paul has rendered the details of his wife’s ordeal in print, either, though he’s hardly said more than the newspapers and television news did in their lurid accounts.
He’s done it more tastefully, more respectfully.
Tom would have to acknowledge that. And how could he tell the story of these pictures, and of Judith, without that essential background?
He takes an overlarge bite of his croissant and washes it down with a fast, hot swallow of coffee as if swallowing down Tom’s disdain, cleansing it away.
He chews and sips more slowly after that, determined to enjoy this moment that may be a turning point in his life.
And when he wipes the last crumbs from his mouth, takes the last drink of coffee, he heads home.
After all, his telephone might be ringing.